Q&A on FDA’s animal-cloning decision

The Food and Drug Administration announced Tuesday that, based on a scientific review, it considers meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats safe to eat.

Q: How is farm livestock cloned?

A: It starts with an egg taken from a cow, a pig or a goat. The genetic material is removed from the egg and replaced with genetic material from a cell (usually a skin cell) of the animal you want to clone. A tiny shock of electricity causes the egg and genetic material to fuse and start dividing like a normally fertilized egg. Once it has divided a few times in a test tube, it’s implanted into a surrogate cow, pig or goat, which then gives birth normally.

Q: Does this mean that meat and milk from clones could be on supermarket shelves tomorrow?

A: No. The FDA has asked meat and milk suppliers to abide by a voluntary moratorium on the sale of meat and milk from cloned animals while the marketplace figures out how to deal with them. Two of the big three cloning companies in the United States have proposed a system that would require farmers and ranchers to pay a deposit on cloned animals. They would only get that deposit back if they could prove that at the end of the animal’s life it did not enter the food chain.

Q: If they can’t sell the meat and milk, what’s the point of cloning?

A: Actually, the whole point of cloning isn’t to produce meat and milk, it’s to produce breeding animals. A farmer or rancher can take animals with desirable qualities – champion milkers, excellent fat marbling or good meat distribution — and produce more offspring with those traits by cloning the original.

Q: So it’s the children of cloned animals we’ll be eating?

A: Correct. Their offspring, and their superior genetics, are what farmers and ranchers want to use. Clones are too expensive to turn into steak.

Q: Will cloned meat and milk be labeled?

A: The FDA says it won’t require labeling. But the meat and milk industry are free to label products as not being from cloned animals, much as they already label milk that comes from cows not given hormones to make them produce more milk. Several meat and milk suppliers have already said they won’t sell meat or milk from clones.

Q: How much does it cost to make a clone?

A: It costs about $16,000 to clone a cow the first time, $10,000 for each additional clone. For pigs, it’s about $6,000 per animal, according to Viagen Inc., one of three companies in the United States that specializes in cloning livestock.

Q: Are the offspring of cloned animals safe to eat?

A: FDA researchers say they are.

Q: Can you tell cloned animals from their naturally bred brethren?

A: No. It’s impossible to tell apart the children of a clone from the children of a naturally bred animal.

Q: What are the concerns about cloning?

A: There are three basic worries that consumer and activist groups have about cloning. The first is safety – some groups don’t think there’s enough research to prove that cloned animals are safe to eat. The second issue is animal health and welfare. Cloning is an imperfect science right now. It takes a lot of attempts to get a healthy birth. Some groups feel that the entire process is too stressful to the clones and the animals they’re cloned from. They say the clones are vulnerable to more health problems than other animals.

The final concerns are moral and ethical. Many Americans feel that it’s not right to “play God” by cloning animals. They feel that in doing so, humankind has intruded into a realm in which it doesn’t belong.

Q: What about the “yuck factor”?

A: That probably comes under the moral and ethical arena. Even people who don’t have any strong religious or moral reason to dislike cloning say that it just is “yucky” and it doesn’t seem that we should be doing it. A lot of consumer concern over the issue seems to be based on that. It’s unclear if people also find the idea of the offspring of cloned animals yucky. Time will tell.